Excursions

Please note that for logistic reasons, excursions still available now can only be booked on site at the registration desk. Please ask our staff for options still available.

Start location of excursions

Conference excursions

All buses for the Thursday conference excursions will depart opposite Maliesingel 29, Utrecht (adjacent to Park Lepelenburg). We kindly ask all participants to arrive no later than 15 minutes before the scheduled departure time; please check the overview below to find out the departure time for your excursion! Because of the travel schedule, buses will not wait for late arrivals; please also no reimbursement will be provided in case of missed excursions due to late arrivals. Lunch will be included in all excursions.

For logistics and safety reasons, we also kindly ask all participants to wear their badges during the excursion.

Overview excursions

Please note: due to logistic reasons, some excursions (B, C, D, I, and N) we needed have been cancelled. If you signed up for one of these excursions, you will be notified via e-mail about options to change the excursion.

Citizens and farmers united in landscape management

During this trip to Friesland and Groningen, the two northernmost provinces of the Netherlands, we will visit three initiatives working to maintain and preserve the cultural landscape and to safeguard ecological values. First we will visit the village of Kornhorn, where villagers took over the responsibility for managing their village landscape from the State Forest Service twenty years ago. Since then, the group has restored and increased the cultural-historic and ecological wealth of the landscape. Moreover, they built a classic hay barn, developed several walking tours and set up nature education projects with the local school. The second initiative is located in the North Eastern part of the province of Friesland and is led by farmers. 25 years ago, they formed a cooperative to develop a bottom-up way of maintaining and monitoring the hedgerow landscape.

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Two farmers will take us on a walk and share their story. The third initiative, King of the Meadows, which is also located in Friesland, is a collective of citizens, farmers, scientists and artists. Over the past few decades, almost all meadowlands in The Netherlands have been changed into intensively managed agricultural lands, with tremendous negative consequences for the plant and animal species that use this habitat. King of the Meadows aims to halt this decline by implementing a broadly shared action plan, which entails reconnecting people and landscape. During the excursion it will be demonstrated how this can be achieved through art.

From the farm to the shelves: food and landscapes

During this active excursion, we will start with a walk through the meadows near Wageningen. Citizens took the initiative to turn the 300 hectares of meadows into new nature which will provide a refuge for extremely rare plants that once were common in the Gelderland Valley. This led to a project in which the citizens, local farmers, nature management organizations and the government of the province of Gelderland are working on a nature development plan. The citizens collective is planning to buy 50 hectares of these meadows and manage them collectively in the future. We will continue our excursion with a visit to a modern biological mixed farm, called ‘Veld en Beek’. In addition, we will listen to a presentation by the cooperative supermarket Lazuur, which was founded over 40 years ago. This local food community connects local producers and costumers in a more direct way, without trade intermediaries. The supermarket is funded and owned by the customers and producers.

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We will continue our tour with a walk past the stream valley, heathlands, and forests near Remkum. This walk will be guided by Martin Woestenburg, a landscape and commons-researcher who studies the relationship between landscape and food. He will tell us about a new set of initiatives in the Netherlands, called Heathland Farms. The Heathland Farm is an innovative concept for organizing circular economies, based on the traditional heathland agriculture which links heath as outfields to arable land and meadows as infield.

Eat locally! Collective initiatives in food, health, and welfare in the Utrecht area

In this excursion we will visit three different collective gardens located in the city of Utrecht. All these gardens have an important social function as they increase social cohesion in the neighborhood. The management of the gardens is done by residents with very different backgrounds; university graduates, students, unemployed people and immigrants, but also vulnerable people like homeless people and addicts. By initiating small-scale and local projects, social objectives are achieved with social entrepreneurship. The first two gardens, Nijevelt and Food for Good, are vegetable gardens that contribute to sustainable and local food production. The third one is a Traffic Park in which people can learn how to cycle or drive in simulated traffic situations. They also offer bike repairs for residents and provide cycling lessons to immigrants and mobility scooter lessons to the elderly.

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During the excursion we will learn how these three gardens are managed, what impact they have on the people and neighborhoods involved, and how people are encouraged to take part in the management of these gardens.

From past to present in Drenthe’s countryside

In this excursion we will visit the rural province of Drenthe, where the villages share a long history of common land management (pastures, wastelands) that dates back to the Middle Ages. This strong tradition of working together is still visible today in the new commons that are being established. While driving through Drenthe’s scenic countryside, which comprises heather fields, streams, meadows, forests, and old farmhouses, we will visit three different villages where citizens initiatives are currently being developed. The first stop is Eexterzandvoort, where inhabitants collectively maintain a townhouse, have built a sports-field, and facilitate an optical fiber network for the Internet. In Bovensmilde, villagers aim at making life more sustainable by means of a collective vegetable garden and a Repair Café.

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In Zuidwolde, lastly, we will see how villagers and companies work together to collectively manage the surrounding landscape, maintaining and improving its natural and historical values.

Brabant’s social entrepreneurs

In this field trip we will visit three new cooperatives in Brabant, that deal with landscape, food and welfare. We will start the day with a walk around the valley of the stream Beerze, where project manager Frans Verouden will tell us about the Land Cooperative. This is an initiative in which farmers and citizens share responsibility for the valley landscape, aiming to improve water and soil quality and increase biodiversity. By buying a certificate, citizens become co-owners of the Cooperative and subsequently owners of the land. The Cooperative leases the lands to farmers from the area and decides under which sustainable conditions the farmers have to manage the area. The second cooperative we will visit is located in the village of Esbeek. It was established in 2006 to improve the quality of life in a context of depopulation and ageing.

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The cooperative, with a total of 600 members, pursued its goals by managing a local pub and town center, and by building 26 new houses to stimulate younger families to stay in the villages. They are currently working on turning an empty church into a public village school. The last visit will be to Heerenboeren - a cooperative of citizens that collectively run a small-scale mixed farm that provides the members with fairly and locally produced vegetables, fruit and meat. A farmer has been appointed for the daily work on the farm. We will be guided around the farm by Geert van der Veer, founder and chairman of Heerenboeren. He will tell us about their plans to encourage the development of dozens of similar cooperative farms by 2026.

Caring in common: citizens’ initiatives for care, housing and food in the central Netherlands

During this fieldtrip through the central Netherlands we will have a varied program, visiting three very different new citizens initiatives aiming to provide care, sustainable housing, and food. After the privatization of national health care that took place over the last decades, there has been a remarkable rise of new care cooperatives in the Netherlands. We will visit one of these initiatives in the city of Apeldoorn. This care cooperative promotes autonomy as the key to well-being and health. A team of ‘neighborhood assistants’ rings everybody’s doorbell to find out how people are doing, if they need help or want to offer help. We will visit their community center and speak with the volunteers about their approach. Secondly, we will visit the Earth House project, which is the most sustainable housing project in the Netherlands. It comprises 23 homes and a community center, which were all built by the community itself, mostly by using scrap materials such as salvaged wood beams, straw bales and car tires.

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The houses are mostly self-supporting, with collective purification systems both for waste and drinking water, passive heating by the sun and thermal mass, and additional heating by means of efficient wood stoves. The initiators will explain the decision-making model the community uses to balance individual and collective interests. The third initiative we will visit is set in Flevoland, a province that was reclaimed from the sea 60 years ago. On the former sea bed, a new ecological estate called Roggebotstaete was established in 2012. Roggebotstaete developed into a natural and sustainable food producing area, where respect for nature and community are base values. It encompasses 52 hectares of forests, grasslands and water reservoirs on which rare species of cows, sheep and pigs roam.

Beware of wet feet! Past and present water management in a high-risk environment

During this excursion we will not only learn about the century-old history of water boards, but we will also be introduced to the challenges of water management in the 21st century. We will start our excursion at the Water Board Stichtse Rijnlanden, where we will be welcomed by the chair of this organization, Patrick Poelmann. Petra van Dam, Professor of Water Management History at VU Amsterdam, will tell us about the history of water management in the Netherlands. Subsequently, Herman Havekes, an expert in water governance at the Dutch Water Authorities, will introduce us to the current organization and functioning of water boards. Late in the morning, we will visit a new lock gate and dike adaptation. At the Peatland Information Center, we will learn about a major current problem in the Netherlands - the decomposition of peat, leading to soil decline.

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We will conclude our trip with a visit to a wastewater treatment plant which is currently being renovated, where we will be informed about the newest water purification technologies (Nereda).

Not wet enough? Past and present irrigation communities in the Eastern Netherlands

Farmers in the eastern part of the Netherlands have a long tradition of collectively irrigating their fields. For centuries, field irrigation was an additional responsibility held by the common-pool institutions that managed the collectively used wastelands and pastures. It was only in the 19th century that water boards were eventually formalized. During this excursion we will visit Het Lankheet, a large estate where an irrigation system dating back to the 13th century has been recently restored. The estate is using traditional irrigation techniques to find solutions for more sustainable land use and for climate change adaptation. While visiting Het Lankheet, the estate owner, scientists, and a water board official will tell us about the past and present of these irrigation communities. We will be informed about a group of farmers, that recently started an initiative to form a new irrigation community, building upon the age-old heritage of communal water management.

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How were the irrigation systems governed and what was their impact on the rural landscape? What are the possibilities for creating new water management communities?

Urban commoners in Arnhem

During this field trip we will visit two citizens initiatives located in different neighborhoods of the city of Arnhem, in the Eastern Netherlands. These initiatives are involved in the rehabilitation of the urban area. Firstly we will visit an initiative called ‘Coehoorn Centraal’, which was established by a group of creative entrepreneurs in the heart of Arnhem. The initiators formed a cluster of approximately 80 small enterprises working in the creative sector and aim to creatively remodel seven buildings - with a total surface of around 5.000 m2 – that are owned by the city council. This community turned an old parking lot into a local park, thus helping to revive a run-down neighborhood. The second initiative we will visit is developed by and for the residents of the Spijkerkwartier district. By educating residents and encouraging social entrepreneurship, the initiators have created a more sustainable living and working environment, resulting in better living standards and greater solidarity in the neighborhood.

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The local government, businesses, education centers, and scientists are active partners in this initiative, but the desires and wishes of the neighborhood’s residents forms the basis of this sustainable business case.

Making the city of Rotterdam

In this excursion we will witness recent developments in urban commons taking place in the city of Rotterdam – dealing with housing, food, and education. We will first visit City in the Making, an association set up in 2014 to take on the redevelopment of vacant properties in Rotterdam and which currently manages a pool of eight buildings. In each of them, a part of the space functions as a common for the people in the buildings, in the street, or in the neighborhood. After three years, the initiators see their goal as going beyond temporary vacancy management to eventually encompass the long-term provision of affordable collectively-used housing and working spaces. The second initiative we will visit is Food Garden Rotterdam. This urban garden provides organic vegetables to the Food Bank, a charitable organization that distributes food to low-income individuals to avoid hunger. The garden also functions as an employment project for vulnerable people who struggle to find a job.

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In the afternoon we will visit Skillcity - a knowledge common in which teachers jointly own the course material they developed. In the South of Rotterdam, one of the poorest areas in the country, primary school children are taught gardening, cooking, aikido or judo, technology and programming, and philosophy on a weekly basis. We will visit one of Skillcity's school gardens with a kitchen and a canteen, where Aetzel Griffioen, philosophy teacher and chief of Skillcity, will introduce the activities in more detail.

Making the urban commons of Utrecht

This trip takes place in Utrecht and involves visits to initiatives concerning sport, food and refugees. We start our trip with a visit to a sports hall, which is currently run by two basketball associations. Board Member Arthur Vankan will explain, on the basis of game theory and the free- riding problem, how they organize their management. This 'self-management' enables them to give a boost to sports while at the same time reducing costs, making it more accessible and attractive to local citizens. The initiative is working together with a regional education center, refugees in Utrecht, multiple sports clubs, local citizens, and the municipality. We will continue our trip to Voedseltuin Overvecht [‘Crops Garden Overvecht’], which currently encompasses 1,200 square meters, but to which another 1,800 square meters will soon be added. The garden is managed by local citizens and serves to offer healthy and locally produced food that is affordable for all residents. They have their own brand and also sell vegetables to local restaurants.

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While the initiative is currently led by two paid employees, the final goal is collective ownership by the residents to create a sustainable future. Third, we will visit ‘De Voorkamer’ [‘The Living Room’], an initiative that facilitates and stimulates the talents of people living in a refugee center and status holders. Throughout their stay, residents have no real work opportunity; ‘De Voorkamer’ allows them to demonstrate their skills, collaborate with local professionals, and meet locals.

Keeping the past, building the future: the common lands of the Veluwe area

The Veluwe area, known for its forests and heathlands, has a long history of collective action. From the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century, most of its wastelands were managed as commons. These commons not only dealt with the use and management of the natural resources, but also with the provision of infrastructure, poor relief, and education, and can thus be regarded as the predecessors of the current municipalities. The common Ede Veldhuizen is one of the last commons that has managed to survive until the present day. During our visit, the commoners will tell us about their history and the current functions of the common. In the afternoon the local historian Gerrit Breman will take us on a walk around the former lands of the common Doesburg. The current features of the landscape clearly show the former use of the area as pastures, fields and wastelands.

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We will learn about the decisions and dilemmas the farmers faced, as well as the solutions they have designed to deal with them. Our final stop will be at a recently established initiative in Doesburg. In this initiative, the inhabitants of Doesburg aim to protect the former arable fields by reintroducing authentic local crops and old ways of farming.

The end of history? Het Gooi as one of the longest enduring commons in the Netherlands

Located between Utrecht and Amsterdam lies Het Gooi – an area with heathlands, peatlands, meadows, and forests. From the Middle Ages until the twentieth century, much of the land was managed collectively. During its long history, commoners had to defend their common rights several times against foreign encroachment, eventually winning trials against the duke of Holland and rich merchants from the city of Amsterdam. However, in the 1970s, the commoners’ of Het Gooi dissolved their collectivity; most of the land has been privatized or is being managed by nature the conservation organization Goois Natuurreservaat. During this field trip, the rich history and landscape of Het Gooi will be studied. In the morning we will visit the old fortified city of Naarden, where commoners from the different villages used to hold their meetings. In the afternoon we will take a cycling tour around the beautiful landscape of Het Gooi, learning about the former use of these lands.

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Our lunch will be provided by a new citizen initiative called ‘taste before you waste’, an initiative that tries to draw public attention to the waste of food.

Cooperating in Brabant

This excursion will introduce us to cooperative initiatives in the region of Brabant from the 19th to 21st century. The new cooperatives are linked to Coopnet - a cooperativenetwork whose members are independent professionals, companies, cooperatives, and volunteers who are actively engaged in the co-operative movement. We first will visit the eco-village Boekel, where about 20 adults and 6 children are currently building a community for sustainable living by expanding their opportunities to obtain their own food, energy and water. Then we will visit a regional museum where we will learn about the rise of farmer cooperatives in this region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The last visit will be to the local cooperative ‘Station-park’ Deurne, where citizens are turning the district around the railway station into a more attractive area.

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They are achieving this by setting up small projects and collaborating with entrepreneurs, public transport companies, and the municipality.

From energy to fruit: new cooperative initiatives in the Betuwe

The three cooperatives we will visit in fruit county De Betuwe have a shared, local social-economic objective: hastening the transition to a sustainable energy and food system and thus creating a circular economy in the hands of residents. We will start with a visit to a wind park with four huge turbines, that was established by Wind Energy Cooperative Nijmegen-Betuwe. 1013 citizens are the proud owners of this wind park, that took 4 years to realize. Their experience proves that democratization of the energy system is possible. We will continue our trip with a visit to an orchard and hear about the cooperative Fruit Motor. This cooperative was established to help fruit growers escape from the trap of continuous scale increases forced by the market and leading to degradation of soils, biodiversity and communities. Active citizens, local growers, Wageningen University and bankers developed a new business model to process ‘waste’ fruit and funnel the proceeds back into the promotion of sustainable orchards.

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The Fruit Motor sold hundreds of bottles of their own processed, regionally branded apple juice and cider. In the afternoon, we will visit Cooperative Bommelerwaar, which was formed in June 2016 in a rural area with 50.000 inhabitants in 20 villages. Its activities are ‘multi-purpose’: anything affecting basic household needs, such as energy, food, mobility, care and housing. Bommelerwaar is member of a national cooperative network called 'Dutch Cooperative Society’. This network implements a system transition from 'shareholder value' to ‘areaholder value’ – the new way to structure the commons. You will hear about the conceptual model and visit a combined flowers and energy greenhouse.

Cooperative entrepreneurship in Groningen

This field trip is organized by two researchers on cooperatives, Sabine Lutz and Willem Foorthuis. They will take us to three new collective initiatives recently established in the province of Groningen. We will start our trip with a visit to a neighborhood cooperative, located in the city of Groningen. We will meet student and teachers from a local agricultural education center, who have recently joined forces with residents and the local government in order to revive the neighborhood. An empty building has been turned into a local shop that sells local agricultural products. Next, we will visit a former sugar factory, located at the edge of the city of Groningen, where artists, sustainable enterprises, and citizens work together on the design of new projects for the future city of Groningen. Amongst others, we will learn about a regional cooperative called Westerkwartier, an integral cooperative that connects entrepreneurs, conservationists, universities, governments and citizens within the region.

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The cooperative is active in food, energy, water, nature, bio-based economy, health, welfare and care. Lastly, we will visit NE(X)TWORK, a group of young entrepreneurs coaching and training their peers on the skills required by new 21st-century industries in the region. Although mainly operating nationally, they aim to extend their businesses to neighboring European regions in order to share and further develop their methods.

Pre-conference Waddensea excursion (Sunday, July 9)

In cooperation with the MARE Centre for Maritime Research, the IASC2017 conference organizers offer a unique pre-conference excursion to the UNESCO World Heritage Wadden Sea. Please note that this excursion will be on Sunday July 9, before the start of the conference. Do also note that this excursion is only suitable for those in good physical condition. In the extended description of this unique field trip, you will find all info and requirements; we advise you to read this info carefully before signing up.